Exploring the Use of @-mention to Assist Software Development in GitHub

Recently, many researches propose that social media tools can promote the collaboration among developers, which are beneficial to the software development. Nevertheless, there is little empirical evidence to confirm that using @-mention has indeed a beneficial impact on the issues in GitHub. In this paper, we analyze the data from GitHub and give some insights on how @-mention is used in the issues (general-issues and pull-requests). Our statistical results indicate that, @-mention attracts more participants and tends to be used in the difficult issues. @-mention favors the solving process of issues by enlarging the visibility of issues and facilitating the developers' collaboration. In addition to this global study, our study also build a @-network based on the @-mention database we extract. Through the @-network, we can mine the relationships and characteristics of developers in GitHub's issues.